/2 100g to the first person to find me, open trade, and hit trade if I put in 100g and hit trade

I put that up in response to someone begging for 50g. Someone found me pretty quickly, opened trade, and then we had a brief exchange of tells with him insisting that he'd won. He did eventually understand how he hadn't won.

Meanwhile the gold beggar had invited me to a group, but I guess he had taken a flight out to the Barrens. So he had a long flight back and I got bored and switched characters.

Why do people not take the time to read and understand what others say? At the very least they should have noticed that I said more than "100g to whoever opens trade" and found that odd. Maybe I was just in a trolling mood. Earlier I'd argued with a ret paladin about stacking int gems in response to him saying that the ret t10 bonus (40% chance on hit to reset divine storm cooldown) causes mana problems. He claimed he was not a whiner but got mad when we (trade chat) offered solutions.

But I'm going to make a huge assumption and guess that this isn't an isolated behavior. No, not my trolling, the failure to read and comprehend. Past lit reviews I've done found that people do not communicate well with text, partly due to loss of non-verbal gestures which are essential when speaking non-literally. Or when there is a perception of meaning within meaning. Combine this with the perception, the desire for the words to mean a certain thing (free gold!), and it's no surprise that people would misread. I suspect this has real life implications beyond just "lol they're dumb". In this case I was being intentionally misleading by imitating the usual message of hide and go seek for gold. If the message appears to be about free gold, is it so stupid to act to take advantage of the situation?

Could similar things happen elsewhere of people making otherwise rational decisions based on flawed perceptions? If so, this has use for preventing scamming or honest but harmful transactions by suggesting that the target problem is not the incurable stupidity of the customer, but instead the limited and temporary failure of accurate perception.

@Shintar: Thank you very much. I actually make these sort of in response to those; I didn't like how a generic concept of "stupid" was used to explain every action taken by others. Surely if humans were so stupid we would have died out long ago, seeing as we're not as physically capable as animals.

@Nick: That's exactly the point. I did say if; I added an entire extra section which is never there, and yet people thought nothing of it.

Nowhere do I imply that I will do it. It is an if. It's this tendency to read what we want to read that causes people to make poor decisions as customers, and in some cases, even worse ones as human beings.